Luigi Marino / Maria Chavez #318
Doors: 20:00 / Start time: 20:30
Entrance 6-10 euro (up to your offer)
Maria Chavez - solo turntable performance
Improvisation with 1 turntable and broken records
Luigi Marino - The Pale Skin and the Mental Maze
The Pale Skin and the Mental Maze deals with intuitive decision-making and the computer's emergent behavior. It is, actually, all about the equilibrium between these two elements. I play a digital synth, designed to be quickly reactive to my spontaneous gestures; an interactive system analyzes my gestures and the sound produced by the synth, and provides a slower and more tangential response. This tangential response is defined by the means of algorithmic composition and provides a sense of self-containment and responsibility for the extemporary gestures. The responsibiltiy of the performer is very concrete indeed, for the interactive system moves through its different phases and evolves only as a response to certain gestures.
Technology is thus used in such a way that is neither an endless expansion of human power nor a passive delegation of intelligence to the machine, but it is a way to achieve a balanced and nuanced dynamic between human instances and machines.
The two outputs -the synth and the interactive system- can be recognized by a trained ear, but this is definitely not the goal of the work, nor is it the visual association between gesture and sound produced. The goal stays within its final acoustic shape. This shape mirrors a continuous exchange between the improvisatory practice and algorithmic structures. Quiet drones, harsh noises, predetermined elements like melodic fragments in just intonation are all subjected to an intuitive sense of duration that shapes the performance and make the gesture indispensable.
Luigi Marino is a performer and active improviser whose recent work has focused on interactive systems able to create interactions between an extemporary performer-driven source and a computer, with particular attention to how intuitive decisions can affect a predetermined structure in a formal way. His work has been presented at festivals such as the ICMC, Acousmatic for the People (Sweden), Intonal Festival (Sweden), Sincronie (Italy), Signal Flow (USA). He is the recipent of many awards such as the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for composition, and the doctoral grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).
Maria Chavez
http://www.documenta14.de/en/public-radio/14725/between-a-gunshot-and-a-whisper
http://www.ursss.com/2016/07/maria-chavez/